


Patchwork

by Jay Tryfanstone (tryfanstone)



Category: A Traveller In Time - Alison Uttley
Genre: Canonical death of young child, Drabble Sequence, Gen, Includes suggested post-canon elements, Nonlinear structure, Yuletide 2020, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:48:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28268646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tryfanstone/pseuds/Jay%20Tryfanstone
Summary: Every stitch she makes is a bright-hued note in the fabric of time, patterns, echoes - Tissie loses her thimble, but it's Cicely who picks it up.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 14
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Patchwork

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StripySock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StripySock/gifts).



> Please note: the first drabble references the death of Anthony and Mary Babington's young daughter.

**Anthony's daughter**

For this, the smallest of all the quilts, Dame Cicely measures out Master Anthony's white satin doublet and slices it into honeycomb pieces with shears as sharp as a killing blade. Candlelight spools across the fabric, flickering memories of the red-hued glory of the Virgin Queen's court at Christmastide, and the burning times under't. She patterns the quilt with offcuts from Mistress Babington's silk kirtle, deep blue, the blue of the pansies in the knot garden, so that for all the short seasons of her life the babe is swaddled in love. There is no wedding quilt for Anthony's daughter.

**Penelope Taberner Cameron**

For Penelope, though - for Penelope, Dame Cicely starts a quilt of honest Lincoln green, and Aunt Tissie finishes it with the triumphant scarlet serge that has lined generations of farmhouse cloaks. A Barnabus brought three bolts home, spoils of a campaign long retired into the faded, foxed pages of the parson's textbooks. Here there are also lines, and essays, and Latin psalms, papers Tissie will plunder for spills and patterns. Francis' faded handwriting maps every conjunction. Yet when Cicely unwraps it, Penelope's quilt is as pristine as when Tissie tucked tansy and silica into every fold and closed the kist.

**Jude**

Six of the brass buttons at the bottom of the sewing box belong to Jude, who polishes them with velvet trimmings from his very own livery. Of all the Thacker children, Jude never returns. Sharp-eyed Jude, who alone can see the timelines, and not travel them: with his pointed face and the twisted back Cicely disguises with down and horsehair. Without Jude, there be no Penelope; the family line would have stopped with Francis, and so for Jude while he lives Cicely sews patchwork of plaid and khaki, denim, fleece, and fur, for all the years he will never see. 

**Francis Babington**

All the Babingtons are romantics under the workaday stuff of the farm, so that Donne sits beside the chap books and ledgers in the yeoman's library. Anthony never gets past Philip Sidney's Arcadia, but Francis spells out, 'Come, friendly bombs...' He has already met Penelope; he knows there are more things in heaven and earth than his schoolmasters teach. Francis learns husbandry and housekeeping and shores Thackers against all the waiting years; for Francis, Aunt Tissie pieces the worn velvet of a riding dress, and Cicely adds a blue serge woven in the New World, to hold his dreams close. 

**Mistress Mary Babington**

For Anthony's young wife there are silks and flowers, embroideries and patterned pleats and Venetian lace of roses and fleur-de-lis. Her wedding quilt is so lightweight that when Penelope pulls it out of the chest she thinks it a Kashmir shawl, before it unfurls, trailing fragments of forget-me-nots and faded gillyflowers, brittle ribboned rosebuds and Turkish tulips, a greyhound's jewelled collar and a baby's rattle. Of all the quilts, this is the hardest worn, unraveling silk threads and stretched at the seams. Of all the Babingtons, sweet Mary endures the longest nights, and Cicely gives her what joy she can.

**Barnabus Taverner**

There's no Cicely without a Barnabus. Some are quiet and some silent, and all of them are tender hearted and careful of thought. Some serve in foreign lands or sail strange seas, far from home, bearing soil fissured in their skin. Barnabus layers hedgerows and plants orchards, beats out ploughshares and cossets tractors, sets furrows and seed, guards sheep, brews ale, thatches, reaps, winnows. Proffers, slyly, pilfered trout and poached pheasants. Barnabus' quilt is plain and stitched of honest English broadcloth, tight-woven and warm, with patches the Sunday best russet and plum of a working man. It's made with love.

**Arabella**

There is no quilt for Arabella. "What will you sew for me?" she asks Cicely, the year Anthony marries and Cicely matches embroidered silk with pointwork, working fast. She stabs the needle through each layer. Arabella is a black gash across the fabric of the farm, an absence of colour as telling as Barnabus' autumn woods. "Green," Arabella says. "Make mine green. No, gold!" She is watching Francis, although Francis is not watching her. But, Cecily thinks, the next quilt will be - will be - a stiff, blue fabric, a mummer's costume, faintly familiar, and a riding dress - "Penelope," Tissie whispers.

**Cicely/Tissie**

Light changes when Tissie picks up her needle. There is a clarity to it as if she has stepped sideways into some other time where sight is deeper; sound sharper and further away; touch more sensitive. Velvet is soft as mole fur, silk, springwater. Colours, bright as stained glass with the sun behind it. Tissie herself is light-hearted, joyful as an autumn leaf in the wind, racing down the paths and patches of memory. Every stitch she makes is a bright-hued note in the fabric of time, patterns, echoes - Tissie loses her thimble, but it's Cicely who picks it up.

**Anthony Babington**

For Anthony, blue-eyed and fair-haired, deep indigo velvet and gold-trimmed white satin, as if all the stars in the firmament shone for him. Put back the clock of time, Anthony demands. In splendour and beauty, his Queen will live and be free, for he will make it so. Let other men cower from their deaths: he will not, he will seize liberty and bear faith as a banner into the dark. But other men's children will govern his inheritance. Cicely weeps as she sews, and for Anthony Tissie always saves the first spring violets, for this the brightest, lost, Babington.

**The Queen**

The Queen's quilt is never finished. Thackers is no great house with gilded ceilings. There is no theatre or fireworks, no long gallery. For all Cecily's starching, Anthony's ruffs are never as snowy white as the captive Queen's, and Tissie has never curtsied in her life. The great room echoes, empty. Still, there's black silk in the piece-bag, and a brocade of cream with blushed roses of the very palest pink. Cecily cut three pieces before she laid down the cutting shears; sewed a single block, before the thread broke away. For all her stitches, this story she cannot change.


End file.
